Continuing to June 22, 2025
Bay Area Figuration (BAF) was a school of painterly (read: loose and improvisational) painting that emerged in San Francisco in the early 1950s as a return to representational painting under the influence of Abstract Expressionism. At the time it was considered retrograde by those who believed in the linear progress of art. If BAF was misunderstood and maligned by some, it found favor with painters themselves — especially those who had never surrendered to the orthodoxy of abstraction — and a public ready for the return of realism and subject matter, however subjectively rendered. In retrospect, BAF was not so much an artistic counter-revolution as an extension of Abstract Expressionism that opened new creative territory. Its reverberations continue today, seventy years after its inception. Its mixture of thematic and painterly freedom, narrative and semi-abstraction, remains a potent force.
“Concentric Circles: Tracing the Radiance of Bay Area Figuration” is a small but surprisingly comprehensive omnibus show that includes works by David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Wayne Thiebaud, James Weeks, and Raimonds Staprans, the first generation of BAF painters. Several were influential teachers at local universities. Among their top students included here were Roland Petersen, Nathan Oliveira, Frank Lobdell, Henrietta Berk, Theophilus Brown, and Paul Wonner Yet a third, younger group includes Bruce McGaw, Joan Brown, Manuel Neri, and Kim Frohsin. All shared a commitment to traditional themes — portraits, domestic interiors, landscapes, still lifes — handled with then-contemporary flattened space, subjective simplifications, and heavy impasto. The notion that the artist “invented” himself or herself as well as the artwork during the painting process was also adapted from Abstract Expressionism. A serious artist was supposed to be a kind of aesthetic monk, alone in the studio, solitary but, most of all, free.
As presented here, BAF was far removed from the cultishness of other styles prevalent back East and in Europe, with their manifestos, gatekeepers, denunciations and excommunications. Diebenkorn and Bischoff moved back and forth across the representational/abstract divide as impulse dictated, without crises of aesthetic integrity let alone conscience.
That stylistic libery is immediately evident in the contrast between Roland Petersen’s brightly colored 2009 painting, “Woman Holding Umbrella,” a gathering of four women at a sunlit picnic rendered in cubistic planes of blues, yellows and greens; and Nathan Oliveira’s silent, moody, spectral bronze sculpture, “Untitled Standing Figure” (2008). Petersen’s brilliant painting celebrates the spectacle of social life, similarly to Georges Seurat’s depiction of immobile, almost hieratic figures that do not interact, with the flickering color that adds panache to the pageantry. Oliveira, who studied with Max Beckmann, creates a psychologically charged space in which single figures loom out of the painterly fog.
Another illuminating comparison/contrast involves two figure drawings and a sculpture: Frank Lobdell’s “Figure Drawing 118” (1965), Theophilus Brown’s “Untitled” (1964), and Manuel Neri’s “Seated Plaster Figure Maquette (1982).” Both drawings are of models in the studio, reflective of the important and deeply traditional practice of drawing studies that could be transposed and transfigured into paintings. Lobdell’s figure, seated on a couch, rests her head in one hand and gazes inward. The power of the image rests not in its psychological observation, but its abstract composition: the pallor of the model’s arm and face contrast with the heavy darkness of her legs and shoes. Their curves are echoed in the sheltering couch arm and back. Brown’s model reclines, head propped by one bent arm, with her left leg crossed over her right, her face a mask. The pictorial drama lies in the contrast and interplay of black and white positive and negative forms unrelieved and unsoftened by mid-tones.
Lobdell’s model could have been the same as Neri’s, except for the missing arms and head, often seen in antique sculptures ravaged by time. Neri’s crouching woman on her plaster-spotted wooden base, posed like the Peruvian mummies that purportedly inspired Edvard Munch’s iconic “The Scream,” symbolizes the ambivalence of the human condition, the transience of the individual but the perseverance of the species.
Finally and significantly, the show features portraits, or figures in landscapes, traditional themes that, again, BAF artists handled untraditionally, eschewing sentiment, narrative, and importantly, professional finish. The signs of the struggle are left visible as badges of honor. The titles of James Weeks’ “Two Children with a Ball” (1963)” and Paul Wonner’s “Boy With Flower (1961)” are pleasantly intimate studies of family life but their inner-directed tone proves more elusive. The blond toddler taking hesitant first steps under the watchful eye of an older sister is a subject easily sentimentalized. By painting the children broadly, partially in shadow, and partially illuminated by a slanted beam from a nearby window, Weeks makes the painting about innocence and protection. Wonner’s flower-bearing youth stands close to the picture plane, cut off at the waist, as if sitting for a portrait. Above and behind him rises a wall of verdant landscape, perhaps farmland, bisected by a diagonal strip of darker green, like a median strip, from which the subject, his face nearly devoid of individualizing detail, has picked his bouquet.
